Google Home, the web giant's internet-connected talking personal assistant, has started spamming audio adverts to unsuspecting folk today.
Never before have we witnessed a technology giant destroy a product with such precision-engineered idiocy. Don't be evil? Do us a favor.
Promos for Disney's new Beauty and the Beast flick …

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Re: Easily fixed

"This site cannot load" is becoming a LOT more common as well. Soon, it'll probably reach the point where it's open yourself up to spyware and malware or you can't surf the Internet. And many times it won't be the site owner who demands it but the host or proxy from which the site owner has to depend. Just you watch. Cloudflare is going to mainline ads straight into the HTML in the near future so you can't block them without blocking the actual content.

Re: Personal Advisor

@robertcirca

I don't think you realize just how much of the infrastructure of the web is controlled by the big players like "goofy" and "facebroken" Or how many large institutions make use of their services and therefore have information pertaining to you running over them.

Trite, "I am better than you because I don't use them" statements just shows your unknowledge of the bigger picture.

Your ISP will be selling your web-surfing habits to them anyway, and any financial information available to anyone will also be in their hands as will you medical records.

Laughing about these guys with funny names for their front ends believing they don't affect you is just dangerous, dumbing them down allows them to act with impunity as the average person (like you) thinks they don't affect them

@Charles 9 Re: Easily fixed

But then again, according to WSJ I've been a subscriber since 1965. (My account got merged with my dad's account. But I have been a subscriber for over 25 years now. )

I use Adblock, and NoScript. So FB and Google don't see me. I do see some ads because they are being hosted by WSJ directly however, its a paid content site so its less intrusive.

I think you'll start to see more paid content sites for those that have actual value. As to other news sites, they make their money off their TV ads and sites if they start to work to bypass filters... they stop using them. I no longer read Fortune for that very reason. Content is not worth white listing them.

Re: Personal Advisor

"Do not believe that a box made of plasic set up in your living room cares about YOU. If you do, you must be stupid, very stupid."

Newsflash: most people in this world are stupid, very stupid. Google knows this, which is why it is rich, very rich.

You know this, of course, because you are not so stupid. Neither am I. But we and others like us - including many readers of this thread - are a tiny minority, condemned to drowing in a vast sea of endless stupid.

What can we do about it? Many things. Join a wacko religion. Switch off the computer and grow tomatoes in the back yard. Drink heavily. Close your eyes and wait to die. Post grumbles on the Register. Get rich by investing in a company with a business model heavily based on assuming that most people are stupid.

None of these strategies will actually do any good, of course, but they help the time go by.

Re: Easily fixed

Re: @Charles 9 Easily fixed

"I use Adblock, and NoScript. So FB and Google don't see me."

Don't be so sure about that. FB in particular have become masters of finding ways to get their content loaded inline with the actual content whether you have blockers or not. And more and more sites are probably going to get proxies so that they're inline with the content, making them part and parcel. And while YOU may stop visiting them, what about being outvoted by nigh everyone else?

Re: Easily fixed

Re: Easily fixed

"Already happening. Third Party Blobs."

I'm thinking worse: inlined right into the article in a way that can't be easily filtered (such as making the word "ADVERTISEMENT" into a PNG with a randomized name or something), and if the government throws a hissyfit, re-base in a country where such laws don't exist.

Re: Chatbots could totally be a trillion-dollar industry

"Only if Paddington Bear moved to Cambridge Mass. and is a professor at MIT. (Sloan I think)"

I think he's referring to the Mr. Gruber who ran the antiques shop on the Portobello Road and was good friends with Paddington (one of the few who ever referred to Paddington by his adopted surname Brown). He wasn't the Brown's neighbor (that was the curmudgeon Mr. Curry).

Hackable home helps?

The only possible use for these things is to hack them up to play WOPR, Eddie, Orac or similar suitable wisecracking digital sidekick that grumbles constantly but then saves the day without being asked.

Google needs human customers

This is the problem with Google, they have no human customers. They have millions of human cattleusers, but all their customers are pretty much businesses.

They don't sell individuals email accounts, they give them away for free, and pay with advertising. They don't sell individuals search results, just more ads. Even Android is free, if you don't mind the ads.

With no real customers, they don't have a good option to start charging for services at an individual level. It's not how they gained their user base.

Amazon's customer's are actual people, they buy products and pay for Prime membership, so Amazon doesn't really need to inject ads (but you can always ask for ads if you want).

Facebook, Twitter, etc.. are going to have a similar issue with their services as Google.

Re: Google needs human customers

"Amazon's customer's are actual people, they buy products and pay for Prime membership, so Amazon doesn't really need to inject ads (but you can always ask for ads if you want)."

That must be why Amazon makes you pay more for a Kindle that doesn't throw adds in all the time or those "Actually Free" apps from their store put up an ad for something random when they start up. The only reason Alexa isn't touting the new Kindles is Amazon didn't have the cojones to try it first.

Re: Google needs human customers

"With no real customers, they don't have a good option to start charging for services at an individual level. It's not how they gained their user base."

I think it's more a case where they couldn't charge a comparable rate compared to what they already get from the ad revenues. Kinda like how cable channels (which are PAID for; ask the cable companies) still post ads everywhere. It's the only way to keep the cable companies from balking at the actual costs to operate.

Seriously, people are surprised?

The Update is definitely a piece of wonderment....

Not an ad, they say.... but an invitation to be a guest and share. Almost Facebookish... I do believe the marketeers have started to believe their own BS. Or maybe it's just an alternate reality/truth?

Re: The Update is definitely a piece of wonderment....

Too many idiots unwilling to question or learn, the marketeers are winning.

One of my favourite Douglas Adams lines is:

Curiously, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica which conveniently fell through a rift in the time-space continuum from 1000 years in the future describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as:

"A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."

Re: The Update is definitely a piece of wonderment....

I actually see their viewpoint; it's not an ad, it's a spammy notification. Like Google Now showing you articles that "may interest you", or Google Maps notifications warning you about the traffic in your area.

Though really the only difference is that nobody's paying them to display the stuff.

Re: The Update is definitely a piece of wonderment....

"A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."

Thing is, I would counter:

"Then they were promptly freed and their aggressors beheaded without even the benefit of being put against a wall by the drones programmed by the jerks (who also happened to have copied their consciousnesses into the cloud as a failsafe."

Yay for hardware attached to cloud services

Re: Yay for hardware attached to cloud services

Indeed, and it puts a new angle on this one from the other day:

Most of 2016's holes had fixes the day we knew about 'em. Did we patch? Did we @£$%

I will patch when the patch benefits me. I will not patch when the net benefit is in favour of the vendor ("v1.01: HIGH PRIORITY SECURITY FIX - we now show you ads every 10 minutes, fixing a gaping security hole in our revenue model").

Of course, with cloud stuff like Google Home, Nest, Alexa &c. you don't even have the choice - you WILL be patched, automatically, and suck it up.

I've long argued that there should be an expectation of security fixes - without bundled changes to UI or other functionality - for the supported life of the product. Oh, and I'd like a unicorn too please, and a perpetual-motion machine.